Re:Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
by philwelch on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @04:02PM
(#23705873)
> It's just a shell game. You think it's really different, but to the corporate bean counters the money is fungible.
Guaranteed per-transaction revenue is not fungible with interest revenue. Interest revenue is extremely discounted by both time value and default risk.
> In a world without significant transaction fees, we wouldn't have the grace period either...
At that point, most of the lower-risk customers who use credit cards would switch to debit cards, credit card interest would probably have to go up due to adverse selection and higher default risk, and credit cards would be a much smaller business overall.
You pay 2% in transaction fees, you may or may not get almost all of it back as "cash back".
In a world without significant transaction fees, we wouldn't have the grace period either, and the people who get the most cash back would pay lower rates and others higher.
The reason the powers that be like the current system and would lobby against a crackdown on fees is because it feels like they're giving you something with the grace period, and giving you something if you get cash back.
But it's just a play on psychology. If there's an injustice, I think it has to boil down to evaluating credit risk incorrectly.